Ancient wisdom

“ For all the ancient philosophers and sages have held two things necessary safely and pleasantly to arrive at the knowledge of God and true wisdom; first, God’s gracious guidance, then man’s assistance. ”

“ To teach us wisdom, and the folly of endeavoring to explain to ourselves that which we are not capable of understanding, we reproduce the speculations of the Philosophers, the Kabalists, the Mystagogues and the Gnostics. Every one being at liberty to apply our symbols and emblems as he thinks most consistent with truth and reason and with his own faith, we give them such an interpretation only as may be accepted by all. ”

“ Wherefore I thought it might be Labour exceeding well spent, if, whilst I enquired into what was anciently known, and what is a new Discovery, I should at the same Time furnish my Mind with new Occasions of admiring the boundless Wisdom and Bounty of that Almighty and Beneficent Essence, in and by whom alone this whole Universe, with all its Parts, live, and move, and have their Being. ”

“ At length it became high time to remember the first clause of that great discovery made by the ancient philosopher, for securing health, riches, and wisdom; the infallibility of which has been for generations verified by the enormous fortunes constantly amassed by chimney-sweepers and other persons who get up early and go to bed betimes. ”

“ but yet ask counsel of both times—of the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest. ”

“ It is to add to your estate of wisdom, and not merely to your knowledge. A man may spend a lifetime in studying a single specialty of knowledge,—botany, conchology, or entomology, for instance,—in committing to memory names derived from the Greek, and classifying and reclassifying ”

“ To my Lord PEMBROKE. I Have sometimes in travelling been apt, within my own mind, to make a comparison between the excellence of the study of Philosophy, and that commonly called Antiquity, that is, ancient history. ”

“ Those principles of wisdom which seem the easiest and simplest to announce are not those which are always the simplest in practice, and the easiest to carry into execution. μηδὲν ἅγαν—nothing in excess—has been to men the cry of wisdom since the beginning of time. ”

“ In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. ”

“ Or have we truthfully presented the highest although, in spirit, the least acknowledged aspect of the real superiority of the modern mind—even the humblest modern mind—over the proudest intellects of the ancient world? ”

“ Was the world then greater and man more powerful than the ancients had thought, and had the ancients been wrong in seeking to limit the efforts of human genius so strictly? Gradually, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the effort of the human spirit to free itself from the ancient limits continued, increased, and became bolder and more methodical. Subtle and ingenious philosophies delivered masked but clear attacks on the limits which marked the bounds of Good and Evil, Truth and Error; on tradition, on century-old institutions, on authority in all its forms. ”

“ But not more likely were the uninitiated to understand the refined mysteries and subtle distinctions of the inner doctrines of ancient philosophy, than are now the frivolous, worldly-minded and cold-hearted of our species to comprehend the lofty thoughts and deep feelings of superior natures. ”

“ To these men the rediscovery of ancient literature came like a revelation, disclosing to their wondering eyes a splendid vision of the antique world, such as the cloistered student of the Middle Ages never dreamed of under the gloomy shadow of the minster and within the sound of its solemn bells. ”

“ How far these young men were familiar with the personages, the thoughts, and the forms of the ancient world, whether they had any sense of our dependence on the ancients, and of our being their intellectual descendants—for that is the sum and substance of humanism—I of course have had no opportunity for determining. ”

“ Christianity happily gets rid of the evanescent and impalpable vagueness of the ancient philosophy, which slipt through the fingers like the statues of Dædalus, and comes to our aid with positive precept. ”

“ Such were the source and origin of the religion of the ancients; truly worthy of man, had he been capable of persisting in the purity and simplicity of these first principles: but the errors of the mind, and the vices of the heart, those sad effects of the corruption of human nature, have strangely disfigured their original beauty. ”

“ They taught us to see how all the ideals of mankind up to the present have their origin in dreams of the subconscious soul, dreams in which humanity is, as it were, feeling its way forward into the future, guided by premonitions of the future’s potentialities. So we went through the religious history of the ancient world with its thousand gods, to the dawn of Christianity. ”

“ Did we receive any training in a single ancient virtue, and in the way in which the ancients were trained in it? Was not all meditation upon morals wanting in our education?—And how much more the only possible criticism on the subject of morality, those courageous and earnest attempts to live according to this or that morality! Did our teachers ever stir up a feeling in us which the ancients valued more highly than moderns? Did they in the spirit of the ancients indicate to us the divisions of the day and of life, and those aims by which the lives of the ancients were guided? ”

“ The heathen world by wisdom knew not God. On theological subjects, the greatest Philosophers and Poets of whom antiquity could boast, were puerile in their opinions, and absurd and contradictory in their literary productions. ”

“ Numerous volumes have been written as commentaries upon the secret systems of philosophy existing in the ancient world, but the ageless truths of life, like many of the earth's greatest thinkers, have usually been clothed in shabby garments. ”

“ But as I narrate the events of ancient times I find myself possessed by the ancient spirit, and a religious feeling constrains me to regard the matters which those wise and thoughtful men considered deserving of their attention as worthy of a place in my pages. ”

“ We had not given space enough to their antiquity for the accumulation of wisdom. We meet even a trivial wisdom in them as if truth were already hacknied. The present is always younger than antiquity. A playful wisdom, which has eyes behind as well as before, and oversees itself. ”

“ The ancient world, with all its nobility and greatness, as well as all its shortcomings, has fallen,—through its own unworthiness and the might of your forefathers. If there has been truth in what I have spoken to you in these Addresses, then it is you to whom, out of all other modern nations, the germs of human perfection are especially committed, and to whom the foremost place in the onward advance towards their development is assigned. ”

“ We smile at these notions of the ancients; but we must learn to look through these material images and allegories, to the ideas, struggling for utterance, the great speechless thoughts which they envelop: and it is well for us to consider whether we ourselves have yet found out any better way of representing to ourselves the soul's origin and its advent into this body, so entirely foreign to it ”

“ To the eye speak the writings of antiquity, the accumulated wisdom of successive generations, the experience of sages, and those holy records which contain the oracles of God, the sacred truths, and the revelation of the purposes of the Almighty towards a fallen race. It is by language, as it appeals to the eye, that we commune with the mighty dead—that we receive into our minds the sublime ideas of a Milton, the learning of a Bacon, or the philosophy of a Newton. ”

“ We use the term in deference to universal custom, although Francis Bacon protested 250 years ago that “Antiquity, as we call it, is the young state of the world; for those times are ancient when the world is ancient, and not those we vulgarly account ancient by computing backwards—so that the present time is the real Antiquity.”—Advancement of Learning, I. See also Novum Organum. ”

“ And when rationalists say that the ancient world was more enlightened than the Christian, from their point of view they are right. For when they say "enlightened" they mean darkened with incurable despair. ”

“ Those that enquire whether there is such a Spirit now in the World as animated the greatest Examples of Antiquity, must seek for living Instances, as well as abstracted Arguments; and those they must take care to produce to the best Advantage, if they expect to convince the World that they have found what they sought for. ”

“ Since almost all of us, without training in arts and sciences, and the Hellenic philosophy, and some even without learning at all, through the influence of a philosophy divine and barbarous, and by power, have through faith received the word concerning God, trained by self-operating wisdom. ”

“ This may seem to be a utilitarian view, with which those philosophers who have cultivated science for its own sake, finding in the same a sufficient reward, can have no sympathy.
The upshot of the scientific attainments of the ancients, in the magnificent realm of the heavenly bodies, would seem to be that they laid the foundation of all the definite knowledge which is useful to mankind ”

“ In the light of this idea, the historian felt that he had come to understand all the better ancient civilisation and our own, and that his eyes were able to pierce more deeply into the shadowy depths of human destiny. ”

“ The noble and sacred science you have entered on is large, difficult, and deep, beyond most others; it is every day becoming larger, deeper, and in many senses more difficult, more complicated and involved. It requires more than the average intellect, energy, attention, patience, and courage, and that singular but imperial quality, at once a gift and an acquirement, presence of mind—ἀγχινοία, or nearness of the νοῦς, as the subtle Greeks called it—than almost any other department of human thought and action, except perhaps that of ruling men. ”

“ Whatever may be the interpretation of certain details contained in your book, the one fact remains sure: it will always be your great merit to have penetrated into the long-forgotten secrets of one of the most ancient rites of humanity, and, by pointing out its great importance for and its connection with other rites, to have constructed a solid basis for further investigations, and to have put loose facts together, and given them a well-defined place in a regular system. ”

“ If this prophecy is not fallacious, we should expect history,39 which eternally repeats herself, to require the man of the New World to witness the same phenomena whose more gradual realisation they have already witnessed in the ancient world. ”

“ The creeds of ancient sages, the dogmas of more modern date, must equally bear the light of widening knowledge and the tests that prove the gold or clay of their foundations, the stability of the successive steps by which they proceed. ”

“ I have shown that in the field of artistic excellence, in literary composition, in the arts of government and legislation, and even in the realm of philosophical speculation, the ancients were our school-masters, and that among them were some men of most marvellous genius, who have had no superiors among us. ”

“ Truths, which are as familiar as household words to every child in the land, were the subjects of earnest and anxious inquiry and of doubtful reality, to the first philosophers of Grecian and Roman times. Not more advanced in natural science, is this age of printed books, of steam, of the railway, and of the electric telegraph, beyond the rudimental knowledge of the ancients—than is this age of religious light in advance of the gross ignorance and darkness of those former days concerning all spiritual things. ”

“ Many learned men have worked much over this question, and some of them say that, having the same facts to explain, or the same things to express in allegory, the various ancient peoples naturally hit upon the same explanations. ”

“ Although, during the later ages of the human career, the higher truths taught by an earlier race were lost, still a slight hint of the beauty and purity of the more ancient worship may be traced through most of the ages of the history of religion. ”

“ The human mind still speculates upon the great mysteries of nature, and still finds its ideas anticipated by the ancients, whose profoundest thoughts are to be looked for, not in their philosophies, but in their symbols, by which they endeavored to express the great ideas that vainly struggled for utterance in words, as they viewed the great circle of phenomena,—Birth, Life, Death, or Decomposition, and New Life out of Death and Rottenness,—to them the greatest of mysteries. ”

“ We who have advanc'd both the natural, and moral, should, as the ancients did, join them both together. By this means, we gather, the truth of the highest, and most excellent philosophy, to be found in those volumes of first antiquity, which we call sacred: and which, 't is our peculiar, and inestimable happiness to possess. We should adore that divine light, which they hold forth to us. ”

“ With the most ancient men and schools I was best pleased, because poetry, religion, and philosophy were completely combined into one; and I only maintained that first opinion of mine with the more animation, when the Book of Job and the Song and Proverbs of Solomon, as well as the lays of Orpheus and Hesiod, seemed to bear valid witness in its favor. ”

“ In a paper on the popular superstitions of the ancients I can hardly do better than begin by giving a few specimens of these precious maxims, which have found so much favour in the eyes of ancient philosophers and old women. ”